The State of American Science, Breakthrough Coverups, and the Danger of Physics w/ Eric Weinstein

It's great to be here. Now, where are the besties?

They declined the opportunity because this is an extended science corner.

I can't believe that Jason has turned tail and run.

No, you and I—I mean, just for the audience, you and I both happen to be in DC right now. We're in a rented studio doing this interview, but good timing. What brings you to DC?

Opportunity. I'm really excited. I've been meeting with the Department of War and took the opportunity to stay a couple of extra days. I've been talking to Director Kratsios over at OSTP and the White House science adviser. Fantastic meeting.

I've been talking to Jay Bhattacharya, who's an old friend over at NIH. I'm about to talk to Jim O'Neill, who's hopefully coming into NSF. And really, I'm just taking a look at the first major proposal to reform American science since Vannevar Bush at the end of World War II. This couldn't be more exciting.

Did Kratsios tell you that I just interviewed him on this topic?

No.

Okay. Well, I did.

Okay.

You guys are old colleagues, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Michael's great. That came up. He said, “Here I am in this new role.”

Yeah. I guess I was sort of worried that this report—obviously, he's filling huge shoes—was going to be a disaster, and I was stunned by how good it was. It wasn't perfect, but it never is.

And then I told you that.

Mm-hm.

And you said that you and I had been talking, and that you had been conveying a lot of these issues to him. I feel like he's really grown into this role, trying to become a student of the American science project. I couldn't be happier hearing him say things like, “We know that we don't know everything. We're just at the beginning. We're just getting started.” So it looks like a great blueprint.

1. Has American science stalled? Cowboy science, Fauci, and the scientific precariat

Government-driven science has played a fundamental role in the success of the republic, at least over the last 100 years—last 50 or 75. Prior to that, there's an argument to be made in the new golden age that Kratsios published, and that others have been making—I've heard you make it—that science has really stalled in America. Can you make that case for us now?

Well, it's a question of which science has stalled. One of the great things about what Michael's saying is that science is a big place, and it's not being done in 1 way.

What I really think is the biggest risk, if you wanted to sort of fly over and give an idea of what's at risk, is the absolutely courageous science that we can afford to do as a rich, ruggedly individualistic nation that no one else can afford to do. More or less, when I see us doing incremental research and doing things that are incredibly careful, with low variance, and calling it excellence, I get depressed, because my feeling is that what we should be taking on is the bets no one else can afford to take on.

It's also the case that our chief geopolitical rival, China, has a problem with freedom. Quite honestly, freedom is a weapon. It is a serious advantage that we can afford to look at ourselves and say we don't do everything perfectly and we want to know the truth.

I want to know whether Fauci killed 10 million people. I should be able to investigate that as a virologist, as an epidemiologist. I should be able to get answers and go through the process of justice. When we have a situation in which our scientists are hamstrung because the conclusion is known ahead of time, we limit our own ability to use cowboy science to drive the rest of the world.

Quite honestly, we're giving away our biggest advantage, which is the middle finger—the American ability to say, “Screw you,” to a supervisor who tells you what is true and what isn't true. A young person should be able to say, “Hey, I think my field is going in entirely the wrong direction, and I'm willing to bet my career on it. Don't interfere.”

This was always the biggest question for me: Where were all the skeptics? Where were all the scientists who were supposed to question the dogma during the lockdowns, during COVID, during that pandemic?

I talked to Kratsios about this when we did our interview. If everyone in the room agrees on something, it's probably wrong. There has to be some degree of skepticism, particularly because the fundamental basis of science is to ask questions, interrogate, generate evidence, generate data, and then draw some conclusion and ask your next question.

But it's almost like the asking questions stopped. Where did that come from? It sounds like you're saying it's because folks were hamstrung socially. Was it economic? What is it that happened—not just in this pandemic, but broadly—that we're seeing this happen more in these scientific domains, where everyone aligns around 1 thesis, 1 dogma, and you're not going to get funding, you're not going to have friends, you're not going to get colleagues to work with you, and you're going to get chastised if you ask different questions or ask whether these assumptions are correct?

This is the question, and let me just answer it: We created the scientific precariat. We created a world in which professors cannot afford to go against a consensus.

The problem is consensus, because if everybody agrees on something, you shouldn't need a consensus. There's no arithmetic consensus. Do we have an arithmetic consensus that 2 + 3 equals 5? No, it just is.

When I hear the word consensus, I get very, very nervous, because a consensus is usually an artificial agreement achieved through pressure. The Washington Consensus is some sort of a thing where we're all going to go in a particular direction, and if you don't go in that direction, you don't have a job.

Jay Bhattacharya is a perfect example of what should happen. You have a guy who has a PhD in economics and an MD, and he went against it with the Great Barrington Declaration. Now he's the head of NIH.

I knew Jay when he was called a fringe epidemiologist by this loser, Francis Collins, and his sidekick, who was probably our bioweapons czar, Anthony Fauci. If I say Anthony Fauci was probably our bioweapons czar, that's going to strike all these people, particularly on the institutional left, as, “Well, that's conspiracy theory talk.”

So my question is: We signed a couple of agreements in the '70s, the Geneva Convention and the Bioweapons Treaty. We have a cryptic system. Somehow, we chose, in that case, a mysterious Ukrainian-British zoologist to receive huge amounts of money through a hippie-dippy charity called the EcoHealth Alliance—money from, like, DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The whole thing doesn't make any sense.

If you start doing things through covert operations, the problem is that scientists can see right through covert operations. If you have great tools—if you say, “I wasn't at the scene of the crime,” I say, “Oh, well, but we have a hair follicle, and I can pretty much tell you you were at the scene of the crime.” That's how powerful science is.

Now you have this different problem, which is that you've got all of these B-minus policy people in Washington, particularly in the covert community—not the intelligence community, but the covert community inside the intelligence community—who don't want kick-ass independent scientists, because they're telling stories and narratives that are easily exploded.

Right now, we don't just have a problem with good science; we have a problem with good journalism.

Right? They also have to fall in line with the pride narrative.

Exactly. When the U.S. went to war, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair with these leg braces, and there was a general agreement that we wouldn't report on the state of the president's health. We had the same thing with Biden. Biden was undergoing some form of dementia.

Did anyone think to ask a leading geriatric neurologist, “Look, examine his gait, examine his speech patterns, and tell us where he likely is in his cognitive trajectory?”

If you're trying to tell a lie that's important structurally, you really don't want scientists exploding it. And I'm not arguing with that. We shouldn't have been honest about what we were doing at a New Mexico boys' school from 1940 to 1945, because science was creating the most powerful weapon ever seen on planet Earth.

For those not aware, that's the Manhattan Project.

Absolutely.

So, what I'm trying to say is that right now, you're not taking those people who stood up and making them the president of a university or the chairman of a department. You're not giving them a chair. I just gave a talk on this at Jordan Peterson's ARC conference. You haven't reinserted the tiny number of people who stood up. You haven't rewarded them. My question is, where's my third home for standing up?

Where's the ability to put my kids? I want to put 3 kids through school. I want to participate in the security and the prosperity that we provide to everyone else. This is the key issue. You've created the American scientific precariat. That's one of the reasons why you have such strange political affiliations, where you don't have balance in the professoriate.

You've got this incredibly dangerous situation where we are not participating in freedom. I will say, in particular, theoretical physics is the only profession to have lost free speech because of something called Restricted Data, where I am not allowed to put pen to paper to write down a physics equation if, in any way, it affects nuclear weapons. Try doing really good physics in a way that doesn't affect hadrons and nucleons. It's impossible. So you have this threat, right, that somehow the law—I'm not even protected by the First Amendment.

2. Boom, Vroom, Zoom: Did stagnant physics save the human species?

But I want to go back to your point about incentives. So, when you say, “I want to have a third home,” what you're saying—I'm going to do the Eric Weinstein translation here—is that, as a professor, I have to fall in line in order to gain tenure, get a grant, get the chairmanship role, or whatever fellowship I'm looking for. If I don't fall in line, if I'm fringe, if I say things that are nonconformist, is that the right kind of way to—

Heterodox?

Heterodox—if I choose to just go against the orthodoxy, right? I believe that it was insane to take the idea of the Wuhan Institute of Virology off the table when it came to the origin of COVID.

Right.

Okay. Insane. It was clear then. And when you said that, you were called a fringe scientist and chastised and labeled an outcast, and therefore you lost access, you lost jobs, and you lost income. There was much that was left out of the equation for you.

Because you asked questions that were heterodox.

I came up with a set of equations in differential geometry in 1987, and I was treated incredibly badly. Those equations took over my field in 1994, and there was never an attempt to go back and say, “Wait a minute, we just brutalized somebody who got things right very early.” By the same token, it's just a very simple process: you're not allowed to want better for your life. You're supposed to be humble. “True scientists don't care about money. True scientists don't care about security. The reward is the work. It's, you know, blah blah blah blah blah.” It's all of this absolute drivel.

The fact is that we are providing your security. I say “third homes” to be deliberately provocative. I used to say “second homes,” and I'm done with that. You're dealing with a level of prosperity in a world in which the Gini coefficients are blowing out. It's almost entirely due to the technology that is derivative of science, and the scientists are not participating. So what you're doing is creating a collectivist mindset because we can't get paid. We can't win. If we get things right, we're out.

When did this change happen? Did we not value and prize heterodoxy, hereticism, and outlandish ideas? The origin of science and the origin of great innovation—which, arguably, America is still the global leader in today—arises from what initially seems heretical, an idea that is far-fetched, unrealistic, and not going to happen. But all it takes is 1 out of 10 of those things to be true, and ultimately the envelope is pushed forward and we find ourselves in a new frontier, right?

Science should follow the same formula as entrepreneurship—in the sense of technological or industrial entrepreneurship, roughly. But where did things change, and why is this just the natural course of things? Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote this manifesto where he talked about oversocialization. Is that ultimately what happened here? Did social media play a role? Is it just that this is the saturation of social systems over time?

Yeah.

Or was there a deliberate external effort?

The one thing you didn't recite in that list of things—you didn't mention my being in the physics department, I guess, at Hebrew University, or my MIT postdoctoral fellowship. But the most important one is that I was the co-chair and co-PI with Richard Freeman of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard in the economics department, because I was worried that we had been losing this.

There's a very crisp answer to this: between 1965 and 1975, everything went wrong. It's basically from the beginning of the Medicare Act of 1965 to a controversy over something called Man: A Course of Study in 1975 that ushered in peer review and control. But if you wanted to really pinpoint it, 1965 to 1969 to 1971 is particularly brutal.

What happened was that the MIT physics department, I think in the spring of 1969, walked out in protest of the Vietnam War, including people who had been part of the Manhattan Project. The government took one look at this and said, “Okay, you are wobbly. We can't trust you. We have a very complicated, cryptic agreement with our physicists in particular. You are the most dangerous, most deadly, most intelligent, most successful group, along with the mathematicians, and we've relied on you. Now we can't trust you because you're not rowing in the same direction that the country is rowing with the war, because you're joining the protest movement.”

What happened was that immediately the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which I think was where lots of government money was being funneled through, was taken outside the university and turned into Draper Labs. The Mansfield Amendment in 1969–1971, named after Mike Mansfield of Montana, said, “Okay, the military can no longer fund blue-sky research inside our university system unless it has an express military purpose.”

That was the disaster, because what the military had done was say, “Look, we want you guys fat and happy doing blue-sky research, which is what you think you should be doing. We trust you guys. We just want to know that you're there for us when we need you.” The military was our best friend.

That was uncomfortable because, quite honestly, you have a huge panoply of different ideas inside of a high-energy, highly dynamic science project. If you don't have communists and fascists in the same department having tea together, something has gone wrong, because scientists are very extreme.

Ted Kaczynski, for example, wrote a marvelous story called “Ship of Fools” about a bunch of people overly concerned about political correctness on a ship that then runs into an iceberg because nobody's actually paying attention to the righting of the ship. They're having questions about—

I didn't even know this.

Oh, yeah. Everybody should read it. Of course, I'm not pushing people to a mass murderer.

It's heretical to acknowledge Ted Kaczynski.

Well, but the point is that—

Scientists are weirdos.

Or at least many scientists are weirdos. If you're not going to deal with truly dangerous minds, I don't even know why you're suiting up for the science game. So where do those minds go if they're not enabled or allowed into the institutions, the establishment, and the machinery of science in America? Are they still around, or are their brains just blunted out and they're only allowed to say certain things? Are we taking great scientists and reprogramming them and missing all the alpha? I mean, what?

Yeah, you're missing the alpha. It's funny that you should say that, because that makes it like alpha male or the alpha in investment theory, right?

Both works.

Yeah. I also do freestyle raps.

Really?

Yeah. No. Well, sometimes.

Okay. We'll talk later about that.

Yeah, cool. Mostly what you're doing is spaying and neutering your best minds.

But the other thing is, look at Palmer Luckey. That guy looks to me like a scientist. He's irreverent, he's got a crazy shirt, and he builds things that kill people.

Yeah.

Right now, if he were in a physics department, he could not easily be that guy. But if you wanted somebody who's still in science and who looks to me like a great scientist, I would point you to Nima Arkani-Hamed. Incredibly charismatic, brilliant as the day is long, completely uncompromising, and he did not go in for the string theory fad at a deep level, even though he's sympathetic to many aspects of it.

Do you guys even know that he's there? He's the best of us currently, and he's still not that old. My feeling is that there's pretty much been a giant decrease in our effectiveness, and I know why. When you kick Jim Watson out of Cold Spring Harbor, which he built, what are you doing?

Do you know that Mark Ptashne is in his mid-80s? He's the guy who wrote “A Genetic Switch” on phage lambda, one of the most brilliant, irreverent people. At some point, I think I sent a journalist to him, and the journalist came back with his tail between his legs and said that that guy's insane.

Well, Eric Lander was the White House science adviser—that's his role.

I think his picture isn't up on the wall because he's an uncompromising, difficult-to-deal-with guy. And my feeling—I hate to say this; this is tough.

You know, if you ever saw the movie Whiplash—

Love it. One of my favorites.

Okay. Well, there's a reason that guy has the best band. He's not handing out tissues. And I don't mean to be mean about it—I don't want a brutal place, but this stuff is pretty unforgiving.

What's the solution to the morass of stagnation? What do we do here to try and catch up again? What do we do here to restructure? Is it about institutions? Is it about funding?

Is it about people? Is it reprogramming? How do you get out of the social circuit that's fully programmed?

3. Weinstein's fix: Blow a hole in the Civil Rights Act, kill peer review, fund people not ideas

Great question. Really great question. Let's just be provocative and throw some stuff out. National interest waivers. I want to blow a giant hole in the Civil Rights Act so that we can have teams that are not constantly afraid of HR.

What does the Civil Rights Act do that makes it difficult for individuals to do what they need? Well, you—

Science—

My closest friend from college—we have a group of 3, 2 Jews and a Muslim.

Mhm.

And the Muslim is constantly teasing the Jews about, you know, “You guys own all the banks and the newspapers,” and we joke with him about him being a terrorist. Now, that is not a model I can explain to anybody, but we've been incredibly close since 1982. My claim is that you don't understand how high-agency people actually form tight, cohesive social units.

If you have the HR department saying, “Eric, I understand you are making an inappropriate joke”—

Screw off. Get out of here. Who are you, and what are you doing in my lab? Let me call security. Why do I need a note from my mommy and daddy to do everything?

I'm not saying be horrible. I'm saying you don't know enough about the culture of greatness to be my HR department. That's sort of what I'm saying. I'm just throwing out a provocative idea. By the way, I'm a Democrat. I'm sort of a Democrat from the JFK school. I don't think I would join—

I don't know what you would be today.

Well, I'm staying in the party. I'm a nail-house Democrat. You know, the nail house is the house that you build a mall around because the person won't sell.

Yes. I'm not leaving the party. My party has gone insane. My feeling is, if we were really who we say we are, we'd be making common cause with the Republicans I met with and saying, “Let's get on with it and reform the system together.”

If you want to brag about how you made America great without us, you can go screw yourself. My feeling is that I'd rather work with you, make America great, and then fight over the credit later. That's how you work in a war, you know. So my first recommendation is—

Throw out the Civil Rights Act.

No, not throw it out. Poke holes in it because you like the intent of it. It's the letter that's arbitraged against the intent, which creates the sort of collectivist thinking. You can't do great work without hyperindividualism and without rugged hyperindividualism.

And so my feeling is that that's not an Ayn Randian thing. That's not a conservative thing. The issue is that I consider myself left of center, and there's no one more individualistic than I am. And so what you need is—I need not to have peer review.

Peer review is a fake story that was retconned into science. You can look it up on Google Ngrams: put quote, space, “peer review,” space, close quote, and you'll notice that there's really no mention of it before 1965.

The reason for that is that the Medicare Act made the government the major payer for medical procedures. The government said, “Well, why are we paying for all this stuff?” The doctors said, “We don't want you to have oversight over our decision-making.” So, our peer review: We will peer-review each other.

It started in a Utah clinic. And then it wasn't until fiscal and social conservatives attacked the NSF over something called Man: A Course of Study, or MACOS. For some reason, the NSF grouped anthropology in as a science. I think that's a mistake. I think what we really need is to have very hard sciences separated.

And my feeling is the weaker sciences should form their own organization and stop using our credit card—

Because they're destroying our credit limit.

Those are social sciences and soft sciences versus hard sciences, where there's an industrial endpoint.

Well, it's not a question of an industrial endpoint. I think that's another thing that's really screwed up: Science has become synonymized with biomedical, which it isn't.

Yeah, and science has become, in the conservative mind, something that the market can do well. Was nobody taking Econ 101? On the first day of school, they're supposed to tell you that markets work really well as long as you're not in a category called market failure.

If you miss that day, you say, “Well, markets are perfect and they can price everything.” But anything that's inexhaustible and inexcludable, which is exactly the definition of science, can't be priced by a market unless you create an artificial market.

So I can't tell you how dispiriting this is. If I've been kind to the Republicans, here's a place where I'm going to be cruel. You can't have morons who do not understand that markets cannot see everything.

There's a reason that we pay taxes for an army. And it's a technical reason; it's not that we think that's a good thing. It's that if you could make the army exhaustible and excludable, you wouldn't need to pay for it with taxes. Your tax dollar has to be used for things that the market can't reach.

Homotopy theory is a great case. When I say homotopy theory in these science discussions, people say, “Well, what is that?” My response is, “Well, you don't know. It's an incredibly important part of mathematics—pure mathematics. I don't know that it has any industrial applications.”

But you go after homotopy theory, and you're pulling out a Jenga block from an incredibly important ecosystem that you don't understand. So my feeling about this is I'm going to inject a PhD perspective into this conversation, because what the PhDs are doing wrong is that they're staying out.

Trump has cooties to them. They don't want Trump cooties, so they don't show up.

Yeah. And now, okay, well, if they're not going to explain to you why we need homotopy theory and we need to tax people to pay for it, the administration's not hearing what they need to be hearing, and the people that are supposed to be saying it aren't showing up to the administration.

That's right. And it's completely dysfunctional and, by the way, the statistic I gave Kratsios is that Nature did a survey of 2,000 scientists, its readers. Nature is a scientific journal that's widely read by the scientific community, and—

By the way, not peer-reviewed until the '70s.

Right, and 6% of the readers voted for President Trump, 85% or something for Kamala Harris, and there was an undecided group. But I think it speaks to your point: Trump is deemed to be so anti-science, the institution of Trump is deemed to be anti-science, that there doesn't even want to be an engagement.

Assume that you detest Trump. Assume that you think Trump is the devil. I just met with Michael Kratsios. I wanted that role. I put my hat into the ring for that role. I didn't think I would get it because I wasn't willing to pledge sufficient loyalty to Donald Trump.

It happened to go to Michael Kratsios. I was very nervous because he's not coming from a PhD background. What an unbelievable growth in that role. The guy understands all sorts of things. I'm here to learn. Tell me what I need to know.

And if no one shows up to do that tutelage, boy, do you deserve exactly what you got, because I think Michael is trying to do absolutely the right thing. I know Jim O'Neill very well from the Peter Thiel universe, coming in at NSF. Jay Bhattacharya—absolute gem. If you can't work with these people, is that their problem or is that your problem?

So, arguably—and sorry, let me just go back to talk about markets and make a libertarian argument. If markets work well for driving economic value, and those who are good at that participate meaningfully in that value creation, there will be wealthy people. Those wealthy people will see the value of mathematics, the value of pure physics, and the value of astrophysics and cosmology, and they'll fund it. Jim Simons—didn't he fund quite a lot of research?

Jim was a genius with detailed knowledge of pure mathematics. Mhm.

So, if you have Yuri Milner, a guy who has a background in quantum chromodynamics—

If you have more of those people—

And the point is—and I'm not trying to argue with you about it—but my point is, shouldn't the market work regardless? They'll see the value of the science that you're identifying. They'll identify it. Capital will flow to that research; it will get funded somehow.

There's a lot of independent institutions out there that get capital. Is that not sufficient for the landscape? I'll also state one of the statistics that I brought up with Kratsios, which he published in his book: Over time, we have seen a significant decline in the effectiveness of dollars deployed against scientific research in the U.S.—an 80-fold decline in return on every dollar invested in government research.

So I just want to throw those 2 points out there. Is there not private-market capital that will find its way to solve these problems? And isn't the government getting worse over time at deploying capital and driving returns? I might be giving you a tee-ball here.

I feel like I should have gotten high on cannabis in order to even take that question on. I don't believe any of that first point. I knew Jim Simons decently well. Jim was the kind of guy who could do that, but even he didn't understand.

My last conversation with Jim Simons, I was trying to explain to him how the Chern–Simons transgression, interpreted as an action functional, is the only rival to Einstein–Hilbert. Effectively, he will find, if he pursues this, that Chern–Simons and Einstein–Hilbert are on an equal playing field as daughters of the ultimate theory. He didn't know that.

Partially, the issue is that it's so difficult in my area to know what's going on in an adjacent area. I just got off the phone before the podcast with my good friend Edward Frenkel, who does algebraic geometry, whereas I do differential geometry. It's very difficult for us to communicate, even though those fields are adjacent to each other.

If you happen to have an algebraic geometer who's a billionaire, one who's a representation theorist, and another one who's interested in category theory, you could do it that way, but this is completely insane.

Okay, so government should fund.

Government has to be the basic funder of these things. We need to have the right people representing the decisions on where we should be funding and what we should be funding. Correct? That's what we did previously: we sort of had slush funds, and very good people had money.

Years ago, I was at a conference in Bavaria on physics, and people were talking about where they were going to get their next job. An old guy came up to us and said, “I just pity all of you.” There was an American, and I said, “In what way?” He said, “You know, I never applied for a job in my life.” I said, “Sorry, what do you mean?” He said, “If you were any good and you needed a job, you talked to one of the people who was high up in the field, and they got on the phone. By the time they got off the phone, you had a job where you needed to be.”

My claim is that when you have administrator types come in and say, “What we need is KPIs. We need to drive this on data. I'm data-driven. I want to know what the translation is,” do you even know what ROI is, or is it just what you can measure?

You want these people on retainer, so whenever you have a real problem, you call up JASON, and it's stocked with the most terrifying intellects you can imagine. We can get to work and solve your problems.

But if you're saying, “Why should my taxpayer dollars go do whatever you find interesting?”—if I can pursue what I find interesting, and when you call me up, I'm going to be very friendly to helping my own country, my own nation, I'm going to feel positive about that. If you tell me I should work on this because this thing is what drives the ROI, my feeling is, do you just not understand science? Do you imagine that your technology mindset is the same thing as my scientific mindset?

You want to get paid. I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. I'm not nearly as interested in having a new McLaren as I am in whether my name is going to be discussed 10,000 years from now, if humans are still around. I say that because Jim Watson just died. My good friends Isadore Singer and Raoul Bott are now dead. Those are people whose contributions will be discussed 10,000 years from now.

Can you say that about almost anyone you know who's doing software as a service? Hard to say. As I used to say, what's the difference between Grigori Perelman and Ron Perlman? In the modern era, the question is, who's Grigori Perelman? A thousand years from now, it's, who's Ron Perlman?

My feeling is that we have our own toys that we care about. We care about our history. We care about different things. It's not unreasonable to want to be able to check into a Four Seasons and fly business class, but we don't need a corporate jet. That's your stuff. Treat scientists like the rock stars that they should be. Otherwise, you're going to lose them. You're going to lose that talent. You're going to lose that moment.

When you say “slush funds,” the way the funding process works in the modern era is grants. You apply for a grant with a very specific set of objectives, and that's what the capital is going to be used for. To your point earlier, grants are typically approved if they're lower beta, which means more predictable in terms of the outcome.

So we're appropriating modern portfolio theory to science.

To science.

Love it.

Yes. Well, that's the way it's been operating, is my argument. Or has it not been? Does that not miss the opportunity to take crazy high-beta bets and not just bet on the idea, but bet on the person?

Crazy high-beta bet.

Yeah.

Let's do an example.

Yes.

Imagine that I have a 1% chance of curing all cancer.

Right?

Should you hire me?

Well, 99% failure is pretty expensive. But the benefit of curing all cancer—the government is incredibly rich, and when you're incredibly rich, you can afford to take different bets to maximize your outcomes. The problem is that the government co-invests through things that are poorer than it.

So each department says, “We can't really afford it. We don't get that many appointments.” We're going to go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome, and then we're going to start lying about how important that is.

You'll notice that if you ask people, “How's your field doing?” everybody says, “It's never been a better time to be a particle theorist.” Well, it's a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? We can't say that.

Again, in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it starts failing, what you usually do is take money out of the thing that's succeeding and put it into the thing that's failing, because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio. Nobody's ever thought about any of this stuff.

What you have is people who don't even understand modern portfolio theory and don't understand market failure designing things. It's really important to know basic market theory, and we don't.

Yeah. If we fix that, do we fund individuals versus ideas?

Say more.

The whole story—I gave this example to Kratsios. Stuart Butterfield worked on this project for a couple of years. He was down to $3 million. All the VCs put money in, and it nearly failed. He called Ben Horowitz. He just told the story recently. He said, “Hey, should I give the money back? This project didn't work. But, by the way, we've been doing an intra-company communication tool for our engineering team. Maybe I could pivot into that.”

He's like, “Yeah, keep the money. Do that. I trust you.”

Yeah.

You pivoted it, turned it into Slack, and sold it for $30 billion. The idea being that you back the person, not the idea. The great entrepreneurs continuously evolve, continuously build, and continuously pivot.

I mean, here you are with Zuck, reinventing that company again and again and again. If you find the up-and-comers, is there a way to find the individuals who are emerging in their fields and fund them for a period of time? Or is this portfolio theory again, where you say some bets are on an idea, some bets are on people, and the people bets should be long-term and fully funded?

Oh, yeah, but—

And you fund them for a period of time and say—

Right? I'll give you the magic formula that gives you an idea of how difficult this is and how tricky you have to be. Tell me who the established leaders of a field will block but will not short-fund. That guy.

Mhm.

Because if you're not willing—I mean, if you—I'll say this with my own main theory: if you are willing to short either Geometric Marginalism or, more importantly, Geometric Unity, I want to dance with you. I want to take your house. I want to take your retirement. It would be my absolute pleasure to destroy you in the market.

Mhm.

But that's not what happens. It's like, “Well, we want to block him, but we know that he knows a lot of stuff.” And we know that we haven't really read it.

There's something about somebody saying, “Look, you're 99.9999% going to fail.” And I say, “Care to formalize that?”

Mhm.

Well, why? I'll bet you $100 that by next year you haven't gotten full acceptance in the [?]. That's not what you said. You said that you'd be willing to put up your house to win a dollar from me, and I want to do that at scale. My feeling is, come at me, baby. That would be fun.

4. Ed Witten drove physics off a cliff, and is Renaissance Technologies a secret Los Alamos?

And let me tell you something: he also listened for things that no one is willing to say.

I am on record as saying that the smartest man in the world today is Edward Witten. Brilliant. Unbelievable. The guy drove theoretical physics off the road and off a cliff 42 years ago. Nobody else is willing to say it.

Mhm.

So the question is: Is he the one person who noticed that nobody's gone to Stockholm, that the Standard Model has not changed? At the recent conference in string theory—supposedly the only game in town in fundamental physics—go to the Strings 2026 website. There's a list of all the talks, and there's a search engine. Put in the following words: electron, hadron, Higgs, lepton. There's no physics in this. They're not talking about anything that could hurt a fly. They're not talking about the physical world.

I was at arguably the world's leading physics institute, and I said, “Who are the smartest people here?” I was given 3 names. 2 of them were pure theorists. I talked deeply with both of them. When I got to the point about how to advance the Standard Model, which is our notion of all the particles you see in this room, both of them said, “I have no interest in the physical world.” And I said, “Well, you're the 2 leading professors at our major, our most expansive theoretical physics institute, and neither of you care about the physical world.” They just openly expressed, “This is madness.”

I give talks at physics departments, and I've now started noncooperation with the departments who've asked me to come and talk but will technically deny me a talk. For example, I've given a talk at the University of Texas at Austin, but I'm not allowed to say that the talk occurred in the physics department.

Really?

Yeah. I gave a talk at the Perimeter Institute in the Skyrme Room. It is not a talk. Eric is answering questions. I gave a talk at the University of Chicago.

This is because your talk and your persona are viewed as fringe and outlandish.

You keep saying “fringe.” Yeah.

I totally disagree with the narrative of the field.

I just outright say that in 1983, physics made sense; in 1984, it did not. It was very stark, and it was like overnight. 3 people—Leonard Susskind, David Gross, and Edward Witten—drove the field in a totally different direction, and now the achievement of this has not been any advance in our knowledge of the physical world, but it has been something that no one knew was possible.

You take the field in which Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and Stanislaw Ulam created the most terrifying weapons from SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1) gauge theory, and you've made it safe. It is now safe to do physics with your geopolitical rivals. You can invite your friends from China to come and become graduate students in your department, and you will fill their heads with things about AdS/CFT that couldn't hurt a fly because there's no physics in it. So the question is: Is this a secret program?

Go back to 1983. Wait, so we drove off a cliff in 1983, and the question is: Did someone say, “Hey, let's drive this off a cliff”?

Well, this happened before. Do you think that there is some community subgroup, set of assets, set of projects that are happening somewhere on Earth that are making advances in physics and have been for the last 50 years?

Great that you asked that question. That would be crazy, wouldn't it, David? Can you imagine if there was a secret place that was making advances in an important field of physics and people who were studying physics outside of that place were being stymied?

I would find it hard to believe that it would be kept secret.

Okay. What happened in 1940 is that something you've never heard of, called the Reference Committee, was established inside the National Research Council. When the neutron was first hypothesized in 1911 by Rutherford, it was then discovered in the early ’30s. A woman named Lee Mitner came up with the concept of the chain reaction, which was then proven by Fermi at the University of Chicago with something called Chicago Pile-1.

Thereafter, a guy named Wright [?] formed something called the Reference Committee inside the National Research Council so that if you submitted a paper on chain-reaction physics to a journal, it got shunted into the National Research Council, and they would return it to you, saying, “Unfortunately, these results are really preliminary. We don't see this as being at the level of the journal. Please revise,” et cetera, et cetera. Now you've resubmitted it. It's still not going. You don't know that this thing exists.

This is how people outside of the Manhattan Project, outside of the white badges, treated their colleagues who weren't allowed inside the Manhattan Project. So let's at least agree that from 1940 to 1945, there was a review process which destroyed the ability to earn a living if you were doing chain-reaction physics and you weren't invited into the secret group.

Yes.

Okay. The question isn't, “Is that nuts?” It's clearly not nuts, because I know that this actually existed and happened. The question is: Did it happen once or more than once? If it happened more than once, the question is: What is the analog of the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico? What is the analog of the white badges? What is the analog of the Reference Committee?

And you have a theory?

Yeah.

Okay.

If it's happening, I've said that the leading candidate would be Renaissance Technologies on Long Island.

I've heard you say this.

Yeah.

But surely there's—

Let's look at the cover story.

Okay.

The cover story would be: We are so good at trading that we don't even allow people who know markets into our firm. We only hire people in directly relevant subjects of physics, like particle theorists, differential geometers, and machine-learning experts. And we have a very strange thing: We have a very close relationship with Brookhaven National Laboratory.

By the way, there's a middling university right next door that happens to be absolutely world-class historically in the exact subjects that would be relevant to doing next-level physics. So you have multiple Fields medalists, and U.S. News & World Report never ranks this as one of our great facilities. Even though, if you look at the people who've passed through State University of New York at Stony Brook, it's unbelievable.

Yeah, to me, that looks like Fort Meade when it was still the No Such Agency, collecting way too many number theorists.

But Eric, people have come out of that place, that workplace. I know 1 or 2 of them, and there are no such stories. At some point, you would envision that some number of them, some small percentage of them, would leak some information or some set of facts if that were to be true about some of this advanced physics work going on, or there would probably be more innumerable returns realized from that than perhaps there have been.

I'm not saying that I know that's true. My point was—and I tried to be careful—if you said, “Eric, that sounds preposterous,” because, to be entirely honest, the concept of Los Alamos, which was published in 1944 by a journalist named Jack Raper in a Cleveland newspaper—he broke the story.

Nothing happened because what he said was crazy. He said, “There is a secret city with a mayor who's supposed to be the next Einstein, working on a doomsday weapon, and the town is so secretive that nobody knows what's going on inside it.” So my claim is that I'm doing the Jack Raper thing and you're doing the “What happened to Jack Raper?” Well, clearly there's only 1 person saying that, and he's nuts.

Well, in both cases, I could show up and start asking questions, interrogate, and see if I can find something.

Again, I'm not saying that Renaissance Technologies is that. I am saying you have a secure campus with a story that makes no sense.

You know markets. Do you have any idea how much the Medallion Fund—

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know.

Because, again, my friends who were there, they get to leave their money there and then the returns continue.

They get to leave their money there is not what happens.

Okay.

They closed the fund to all but internal money.

Yes. Yes. That's what I mean.

You know, another interesting story—

But if you leave the firm, your capital can stay in the Medallion Fund.

So my claim to you is Jeffrey Epstein had a story which is that he only accepted a billion dollars or more invested with him if you gave him power of attorney. These things tend to have some reason that no person outside has money and gets to ask questions. Right?

So Jeffrey Epstein did not run a hedge fund. He told me that he ran a multi-strategy FX hedge fund and that he needed a 727 because it had a trading floor, and he filled it with yeshiva students because they were the only ones you could trust. He was extremely specific about using trend-following, mean reversion, and carry as the 3 strategies. He said he didn't do any gamma trading or options trading. That was a lot.

It was a cover story that burned, and then he became disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and then he became tax expert Jeffrey Epstein. You're looking at a fake world with cover stories that fail over.

If you remember the old Get Smart line: “Would you believe 1,000 special agents are going to swarm this?” I find that very difficult to believe.

100 policemen—

You know, not true, Miss Maxwell. 2 Boy Scouts with a slingshot. This is fake. And my claim is: I don't know what's going on at Renaissance, but Jim Simons is an absolute genius. Hardly distinguished in that. We have many. And I don't know anybody who's ever gotten close to these returns.

I don't have any information about what that thing actually did, does, or claims to do.

Yeah. I'm saying it has very close relationships with a talent pool at Stony Brook that is not acknowledged, and with a national lab.

Go back to 1983–1984.

Yeah.

And assume we did not go into this quantum universe—

Not quantum—quantum gravity universe.

Quantum gravity universe, right? And we're in a different universe where we have a sense of what that physics looks like today. If we progressed physics, help a generalist audience understand a little bit about what it would mean if physics didn't stall out. Before I do that, let me just ask this question.

Some would argue that physics has played an important role and maybe it's not fundamental, and that might be your answer here, in advancing things like semiconductor manufacturing technology, advanced lithography, and materials science. We've made tremendous progress in our capacity to drive compute, and that's led to this moment today where we have these tools that we call AI—

Right?

And all the underlying advancements in chemistry, materials science, and physics got us to this moment today.

Yeah. And that we've made progress and it has been applied. That would be one argument.

And so maybe tell me why that kind of misses the point, and then we can talk a little bit about what the world would look like today if we didn't go off track in 1983–1984.

Great question. Let me try to engage that, and then feel free to redirect me if I'm not answering the question. In the theory we have, which I'm going to call the frontier model, which combines general relativity and the Standard Model of particle theory, we know certain things that we can't use.

We found out that there were 3 valence quarks inside of every proton and every neutron. Nobody has ever pulled a valence quark out of a proton or a neutron in isolation. Something called infrared slavery. And screw the woke for not saying we can't say the word slavery. Infrared slavery. Deal with it, boys. You have a situation in which there is no industrial application. We've known about it since 1968.

So sometimes you don't get to use something for an extraordinarily long period of time. But what happens if some advancements—maybe we're never going to pull a quark out of a proton? Maybe it's impossible. What if there are other things we might be able to do had physics actually advanced?

In the mid-1970s, the two gentlemen called Abdus Salam and—I forget Pati's first name—put forward the Pati–Salam model. I believe that the Pati–Salam model will be found to be the correct first-order grand unification above where we are. The problem is that it has something called SU(4) rather than SU(3).

SU(3) is what generates the force that keeps all those protons from running away from each other inside a nucleus, because, obviously, like charges want to repel. That's why we were able to take out 2 Japanese cities in 1945: we got control of the strong force, and that allowed us to use the electromagnetic force to generate completely destructive power, but it didn't destroy protons and neutrons.

What happens when you have SU(4) is that you see that the electron and the neutrino are the fourth color that we associate with the up quark and down quark, which make up protons and neutrons. You could have a weapon that rotates up quarks and down quarks into the lighter leptons that disintegrate matter.

You could have dark chemistry. Dark is not the right concept. It's really decoupled matter. Dark matter is decoupled matter. Neutrinos are essentially dark matter. They're barely detectable. In fact—

They don't interact.

Well, they do—

But very, very weak.

Very, very weak. Only through the gravitational and weak forces, which are the 2 incredibly weak ones. Well, but here's another possibility: if you rotate a neutrino into some charged particle, you can send it through the Earth.

Just explain what you mean when you say “rotate.” What does that mean? These neutrinos are subatomic particles. They don't really interact well, but what does it mean to rotate them?

I think a large amount of the energy produced in the Sun is neutrinos that actually come out. You and I are being irradiated by billions of neutrinos, and the only reason that we're not dead is that they don't interact with our atoms.

Well, they barely interact. Once in a blue moon they do. So, at night, the Sun is streaming this through the Earth. It's passing through all of us.

Yeah.

But when it gets to us, it keeps going. You can shoot it through—I forget what it is—a light-year of lead, and you very rarely interact. What happens with the rotation is in this sort of internal sense. So it's kind of a metaphor of rotation in this abstract place—

—which leads to a neutron. If I put a neutron on the table and we just sit there and watch, with a half-life of something like 17 minutes—I forget—it'll turn into a proton. This is called beta decay because what came out is that people saw an electron scream out of the neutron, and that's why a neutral particle became positive: the negativeness went off in the electron.

So, just to be clear for the audience, a neutron can turn into a proton and release an electron at the same time.

Yeah.

But that turned out to be the wrong model, because what it really did is that there were 3 quarks inside of it, and one of the down quarks. So a neutron is down, down, up. A down quark let off something called a W−, which is a force particle, not a matter particle, and then that thing decayed into an electron and something else.

The only reason we determined that there was something else going on is a little bit like accounting. If you have a really good accounting system and you notice that the envelope from the till is a little light, you say, “Okay, according to conservation principles, somebody has been messing with the money till,” and that turned out to be the neutrino.

So what happens is that a neutrino and an electron have the same relationship as an up and a down quark, and you can transmute them using these W particles. The danger of this is that when you have more force particles than we currently know, things that are, to all intents and purposes, stable now might not be stable in that new regime.

So you could disintegrate a mountain, potentially, if SU(5) is present. SU(4) is more stable than SU(5). I don't think SU(5) is relevant.

But what I'm saying is, if you think about physics, think about boom, vroom, and zoom as an easy way to keep track of why this is our most terrifying and most amazing subject. Boom is weaponry, vroom is energy, and zoom is propulsion, computation, and all the cool stuff that we get to do.

The Standard Model got finalized, more or less, 53 years ago. For 53 years, you've been denied new boom, vroom, and zoom. Potentially, the stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species because the boom is so terrifying. I can't tell you whether that's true or not, but it means that you don't have any vroom and zoom from the new stuff that could have occurred.

And so we have to be honest. I want the zoom in particular. We could probably make the case that no one on Earth got there and everyone has aligned around the distraction, the disinterest, and the pursuit because of that absolute risk. Because if someone did actually make advancements and they could access the bigger boom—

Yeah.

—it would be game over already. I mean, there's no such thing as more absolute power that would give an individual or a group the ability to leverage that in some way to their kind of infinite will.

I don't agree with this at all.

Great. Okay. So I spent 2 years indoors being hounded to be vaccinated because of 4 amino acids being spliced into the spike protein of the coronavirus. My guess is that that's pretty easy, right? Think about it: you need 12 nucleotides to code for 4 amino acids at the exact right place in the spike protein of the coronavirus, and that's enough to shut down Earth. This is high-leverage science.

There's a marvelous scene in Breaking Bad where the protagonist, named Heisenberg, takes what appears to be crystal meth and throws it in the office of a psychopath named Tuco. Tuco says, “What the hell was that? It caused that massive explosion.” I forget whether it was lead azide or mercury fulminate, or one of these extremely volatile compounds.

Do you have any idea how easy it is to make black powder? I ask modern audiences, and nobody knows that it's 75% saltpeter, 10% sulfur, and 15% charcoal. The Anarchist Cookbook has gone out of discussion.

The power of science, the leverage of science, is so profound that we should at least ask the question: what if you had nuclear weapons that didn't require a centrifuge? What if there are easy things to do that high school students could do?

You remember this guy who scavenged the americium from smoke detectors to build a working reactor, and I think it was in Brooklyn.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, nobody thought, “Collect 218 smoke detectors and you can have a working nuclear reactor.”

Yeah. So my claim is that if you want to think about Walter White as a paradigm, you have to go back to something called United States v. Progressive, in which the Teller–Ulam design for a thermonuclear weapon was put forward in a publication, and the government said, “No, no, this is restricted data. We need a prior injunction.” This is the most dangerous piece of geometry. This is Stanislaw Ulam’s work.

The whole idea is that if you’re going to use a fission device, a chemical shell compresses subcritical fissile material to create a detonator out of an atomic bomb. How do you get that to compress a rod or something into a fusion device? The only thing that can reach that tertiary stage fast enough is light. You have to figure out the geometry, because the detonator is going to rip apart the entire assembly if it doesn’t get it right.

That secret got published, and the only reason the government didn’t go after Howard Morland is that we stupidly declassified all sorts of pieces and shards of this, and he went to the Los Alamos library and pieced it together. My claim is, if you don’t know the story of John Aristotle Phillips, the substandard physicist who, in his Princeton thesis, said, “Look, I’m not very good, Freeman Dyson. I want to use the fact that I’m not very good to do something amazing. Tell me whether or not you will let me come up with a plan for an atomic bomb.”

Freeman Dyson said, “I will give you no help, but I’ll tell you whether it will work.” So the substandard physicist put this together and submitted his junior thesis. I forget whether it’s page 24, but that thesis is not in the library, and the government removed the page that has the plan.

The fact is that this stuff is readily present, and we’ve never seen an atomic weapon used since 1945, mostly because we don’t use this power. But if it turns out that it’s easy to do, then, by the way, if the U.S. fails with Iran, you’re going to see a proliferation of countries acquiring nukes because we trusted the U.S.

But you’ve got this: You are the world’s policeman. Petrodollars aren’t petrodollars; they’re violence dollars. The U.S. was supposed to have the violence needed to secure the oil, and the oil backs the money. We’re watching the disintegration of that regime in real time as the U.S. goes through its Suez moment, right?

Whether you think Donald Trump should have gone into Iran or not—and I happen to think that he was courageous and did something that we should have done in 1981 or ’82 or something—we have to win. We have to win, because if you have a world that decides that there is no world’s policeman, everybody’s going to want their own nuke.

You can go back to the Tom Lehrer song “Who’s Next?” and you’ll find that, more or less, you’re going to have a world in which you can’t figure out the game theory because it’s no longer dyadic. It’s multipolar.

Imagine a world beyond nukes.

Sure.

What does that world look like? What else is there beyond the boundaries of what, at this point, is almost an 80-year-old technology?

Sure.

5. UAPs, multi-temporal adversaries, and Einstein's prison

And again, I go back to the ’83 story. We’re making advancements. Did we stop making advancements? Is someone else—is China—going to make these advancements? What does that look like? Is that what UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, are? You’ve recently made comments that you were a deep skeptic on UAPs, but now you have a view that maybe there’s something there.

Oh, there’s definitely something there.

Okay, so there’s something there. It may be China. It may be us. It may be a fake story, but there’s definitely something there based on the videos and the first-person accounts.

It’s not the videos. I’ve never cared about the videos.

I’ve talked to too many smart, sober people, too many similar stories.

There are definitely special-access programs—

Yeah.

—that are all about this.

Yeah.

The only thing that we learn that works to keep secrets is compartmentalization. We are so compartmentalized that almost no one can piece the story together. It may be that the so-called stovepiping is such that we can’t figure out what we know because we can’t talk to each other.

If you want to know what’s possible, I could freak you out, and it would be super cool and super frightening. One thing is that I’m worried about multitemporal adversaries.

Time traveling—

Time travel—

Times—

Everybody says “time travel” because they think that time can only be one-dimensional. But imagine, for example, that you put a giant gun on a railcar. The railcar can only move in 1 dimension. Now somebody puts a giant gun on something like a tank, and you go to the Bonneville Salt Flats. Now you can move in 2 dimensions. Now you put it on an A-10 Warthog, and you can move in 3. Those are all spatial dimensions.

Why do you think there’s an arrow of time? It’s because you believe time can only be one-dimensional. I don’t think time is one-dimensional. If you meet an adversary who has access to multitime, it’s like you’re trying to compete with them with an A-10 Warthog, and you’ve got your only gun on a track—except with time rather than with space.

If I could sneak up behind you in time, knowing your intent—I mean, this is terrifying stuff to me. It’s also like I would love to have this over our adversaries, but I don’t want to meet anybody who knows how to do this kind of stuff, not on a level playing field.

Let me say another one: The solar system is an escape room. Elon was focused on Mars. I said that Mars is a red herring; it’s a MacGuffin. Now he’s focused on the moon. He is our only adult, so far as I can tell, as crazy and mad as he is, and he uses that to motivate engineers because Mars is barely doable.

These are the only rocks that are potentially habitable. It’s not enough diversity if we have this much power in these few spheres on which we could put atmospheres. Assume that you could put atmospheres on Mars and the moon, and you could get back and forth between them with chemical rockets. You’d have 3 places to screw up.

We need tens of thousands, if not millions, of places before we figure out how to civilize ourselves. We have to get out of here. It’s too expensive to leave the solar system.

My claim is that in an Einsteinian world, you’re never going to. If Einstein is left in force, the speed of light is too brutal. You go to Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away, and come back. You do it at nearly the speed of light, and everything is 8 years advanced by the time you get back home. Nobody wants to do that, and that’s just the first star.

My claim is that we have been too long in Einstein’s prison. General relativity really begins in 1913. It’s really due to Grossmann and Einstein, not just Einstein alone. I don’t know why we say that. It’s not really Einstein–Hilbert; it’s really Einstein–Grossmann.

More or less, since 1915 to 1917, the equations haven’t moved. They’re going to break because of what’s happening in southern Arizona. Kitt Peak has this object called DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, and I believe that it is going to show that the cosmological constant times the metric, which is how we encode dark energy into the equation, is going to break because it’s not constant.

The only reason that you have lambda times the metric, which is this term, is the product rule. If you take a derivative called divergence, you have to take the derivative of lambda times the metric left alone, plus lambda times the derivative of the metric. The derivative of the metric has to vanish. That term is the only possible term that can go there because of something called Lovelock’s theorem.

If you’re within general relativity, you’re trying to do this geometrically. My claim is that’s going to break. We’re going to get to 5 sigma if we aren’t there already. I haven’t kept up with the news. And then we’re going to realize that dark energy, the most important—

—makes up 60%, 70%, 80% of our universe.

We have the wrong formula for it.

We have no contemplation of what it is.

Well, I’m focused on saying I have a candidate formula, and I think everybody who has one should come forward. We should hold a conference and say, “Who wins? Who’s got the best idea?” We can’t just have Ed Witten patting himself on the back, saying, “Well, string theory is the only game in town.” It’s like, 42 years later, come on. This is preposterous.

Getting back to policy, give me some money and get rid of these people. I don’t want them reviewing anything that I’m doing. Give me somebody competent to talk to.

Sorry, let me just go back. The dark energy measurement, which we’re going to end up having a very high-accuracy estimation—

Right.

—tells us that the general theory of relativity and the equations associated with it are wrong because of the relationship that we see between matter and rotation and movement. There’s something off about that.

We know that general relativity is not the last. We know general relativity is wrong. It is a view. It is a derivative. It is the map and not the territory. It is a great, great model. Whoever comes next has to recover it.

But there is no initial singularity due to the Big Bang, nor is there a singularity in the center of a black hole called the Schwarzschild singularity. That’s where our ignorance shows. We have 2 singularities we can’t get rid of inside the theory, so you have to go outside of it.

But the thing is, it’s so perfect.

Yeah.

Nobody can figure out, in the first 4 seconds of a physics talk, you say, “Let X13 be a spacetime manifold.” Well, okay, it’s over.

Yeah.

That's the sarcophagus, and you're already in an Einsteinian frame of thought. We know that it's wrong, and nobody can figure out how to make it wrong. That is what keeps us stuck here. There's a marvelous demonstration around 2003 at a TED Talk of this guy showing a surface. He's got some sort of display, and he does this, and suddenly everything enlarges; then he does this, and everything gets smaller. This is the beginning of a multitouch gesture called pinch-to-zoom that we all use.

My claim is that we don't realize pinch-to-zoom is probably built into the thing that we're confusing for spacetime. We don't know to do this, and when you do that, you change the distances. You don't need to break the speed of light. This is, again, you're asking somebody who can't come into the physics establishment, who is in physics. I am in the physics establishment. We're in some sort of crazy world in which people who have radical ideas can't do the radical ideas inside the institutions.

A radical idea is that male and female are mostly determined by the SRY complex on the Y chromosome. If I say that, I can't be in a meeting because I'm a bigot. I can't be in a physics department because I think Ed Witten drove the field off a cliff. Nobody else is saying it. Clearly, the one person who's saying that has to be wrong.

Yeah.

The whole thing is that I have the first paper, I think, on the danger posed by mortgage-backed securities. I think I was the only person to loudly say, "You don't know whether Biden's going to make it to November." And I think I said loudly, "I think this is 4 years of dementia." When people say something different, do you force them back into the consensus? Well, that's what nations do. We have become a nation when it comes to science.

Talk about China.

6. China poaches our best scientists, AI reads the trash can corpus

Yeah, let's talk about that. First of all, France is historically the world's greatest mathematical country. China, where we're always taught to be so scared of the Chinese in math, couldn't buy a base hit until very recently.

What they're doing is looking at us with our absolutely ridiculous collectivist fictions, and they're sidling up to our best people and saying, "Are you sure you wouldn't want to be free? You sure you wouldn't want to get paid? Come over to China. Taste the freedom. Get paid. Have fun."

Right?

And our people are going there.

American scientists are going to China. American scientists, Russian scientists—all sorts of scientists are going to China for some prestige, some money, and some freedom. We are going to train them up, and they are going to be frighteningly good up until the point that that freedom involves Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and Taiwan. Are they going to rethink some of these thoughts on the path we're taking in physics? Are they going to be fundamental in how they rethink things?

Let me tell you what I really believe on that.

Yes.

The AIs are going to change soon. Right now, the AIs are trained on a corpus that privileges things like Cell, Nature, and Science as the prestige journals of biology. In mathematics, it would be Inventiones Mathematicae, the Annals, and the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. These are where the narratives of the fields are held.

The trash can is also a corpus. Take all of the ideas that have been poo-pooed and laughed at and call that the trash-can corpus, the TC corpus. The AIs are going to start reading all of the things that our leading physicists have laughed at. Look out.

That's where the discovery and the reinvention are going to happen.

China is going to have a private model, and they're going to say, "Assume that the completely failed, most failed theory in the history of modern physics—string theory, and something called M-theory and quantum gravity—is a red herring meant to distract us. It's not our leading theory. It hasn't been our leading theory for 42 years. It can't be. The dog can't hunt. What was it meant to stop us from seeing?"

The AI will get there.

The AI will get there.

And when the AI gets there, we have—

Everyone who has an AI that can do this. Again, I'm saying completely radical things because, quite honestly, that's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to have John von Neumann's and Richard Feynman's and Paul Dirac's and all of these characters, and we don't have any of them.

I'm trying to say what this sounds like: "You're all wrong, and I'm right." Don't tell me that I'm arrogant or conceited, that real scientists are humble, or that if you understand something, you can explain it to a 5-year-old. That's all nonsense. What I'm trying to say is string theory has not been our leading theory for 42 years. It has never been the only game in town.

Just the way Jeffrey Epstein was never a hedge fund manager, we're not allowed to say this. I don't know why. I want to know: Is there somebody over at the CIA, in the Directorate of Science and Technology, who would like to have that conversation? Is there anybody over at the Department of Energy who would be interested in not having this conversation right now?

You and I are having a conversation with our friends, the Chinese and the North Koreans and the Russians. Why are we doing this? Are you so confident that I'm wrong, given this obviously huge amount of knowledge that most people have never heard?

Well, I think the question is, can you really distinguish and can you really cage the AI? I mean, at the end of the day—

Say more.

So, if the rate of progress with AI is such that the ubiquity of access and the corpus—to your point, of knowledge and non-knowledge—is apparent to everyone, the AI can be directed from anywhere. It's probably a conversation about what humanity looks like, and I think that's a conversation with humanity, not with nation-states per se.

Well, I think what I'm trying to get at is that my model of AI is that it is insane to have pushed out AI as a commercial product. It's just funny. Let me imagine the scene from Silence of the Lambs.

It's just matrices and linear algebra, I mean—

Yeah, it's just inner products.

Mhm.

There's a scene in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter is wheeled out on a gurney in a straitjacket with a crazy mask, and there are all these people around because he's so dangerous, but he's very, very intelligent. That's what I think Anthropic is doing. "Here's your new employee, Hannibal Lecter. He's a consultant. You've hired Hannibal Lecter from a temporary agency."

The harness that's supposed to keep you from hurting yourself is all the people around him, the mask, and the straitjacket. And we've decided that this military research project is something you need in your home. It's like telling people, "Look, the Second Amendment just says the right to keep and bear arms. We have this thing we haven't used called the Davy Crockett, a soldier-launched personal nuke. Why isn't it available at Kmart with a waiting period?"

Yeah. Well, it's been distilled at this point. I don't know if that's a relevant point anymore, because models have been distilled, the model development has been commoditized, and it's been open-weight released. It's out there now. Models are there. Models are here.

Yep.

And to your point, maybe those models get pointed at the path of discovering novel physics and look at strange texts and ideas and rethink everything.

It's going to be a hell of a ride.

It's going to be a hell of a ride. I just want to hear your one assessment, because I wonder if this is a glimmer. What do you think UAPs are today? Is that really the first window into what's happening? If there's something there, the question for you is: What do you think UAPs are today?

Let's answer that question, but I want to take it—let's do it in a debugger, and we'll step through it line by line of the code as it executes. I look at you, and I'm on a podcast. My first thought is, I know what risks I'm running. If I say what I think, I can tell you which colleagues will not open their doors to me. No, I'm not kidding.

When I took a job with Peter Thiel, let's imagine that there are only about 125 people I can speak to about my work. I would say 30% of the doors closed to me just by virtue of the fact that I work with Peter Thiel. I don't think he's the devil, and he's a close personal friend. Now you're asking me the question of how many of the remaining doors would you like to close?

Eric, it's not just a question. I know how these people think, and I know how terrified they are. Let's answer it anyway. If general relativity is really the last word, I think these UAP/UFO things are nation-states' experimental weapons systems. I think there's been some breakthrough, particularly in the 60s.

There's a 1971 Australian intelligence document where Australia, which was the testing ground for the nukes of the United Kingdom, started seeing all these UAPs near their nuclear tests, just the way we see them near ours. The Australians revealed that many of our best people and many of our top institutions were doing antigravity—technically, gravity-shielding—research. The cover story was the golden age of general relativity, where suddenly general relativity was hot from the early 50s to the late 60s and early 70s.

The claim from the 1971 document is not the only reason everybody went toward gravity. There was interest in gravity shielding, antigravity, and so on. I don’t believe general relativity is the last word. I believe pinch-to-zoom exists. There’s another multitouch gesture called shear-to-tilt, and that means we can leave our solar system.

Okay, that’s great news because it means we can survive. The implication is, if we can leave, everyone else can come, and given the size of the universe, the odds that we are the most advanced life form are laughable. There’s no point in worrying about them. So if we can leave, I think they’re here, and I think we can leave.

I think the scenario to worry about is North Sentinel Island. Everybody who lives on North Sentinel Island is considered a citizen of India, and they don’t know the word “India.” They’re an uncontacted people who don’t know that they’re part of something larger that watches them and does not allow people to land. But if they started sending out radio signals and then started letting off nukes on that tiny little island, India would not have this paternalistic attitude toward its primitive tribe.

My concern is that when we let off a nuke in 1945, or when Italy became very good at quantum theory with Fermi and—I forget the name of the Via Panisperna boys—and there was this Magenta incident under Mussolini, somehow UAPs are very tied to nukes. I believe that a nuke is the sign that you become advanced enough that the next thing you figure out how to do is leave and traverse through propulsion.

We don’t realize that yet because we’ve never seen that happen. But my claim is that almost every civilization, before it gets to using the profound propulsion game—which is these multitouch gestures—first lets off a nuke. We’ve alerted whatever India is in this analogy. We’re almost ready to come out, and we’re so pathetically unevolved that we are a danger to any other civilization if there’s so much power in the next theory, which I believe Geometric Unity is.

Now, that will cause a certain percentage of your audience to say, “Oh, it’s just self-promotion,” as opposed to, “No, no, no, that’s what you’re supposed to do. If you have a theory, you talk about it.” I think there are all sorts of things that you can do. I think there’s multi-temporal movement, dark chemistry, and dark light. I think there are 2 other families of chiral matter left to discover at a luminous level. Spin-3/2 matter exists. I believe that SU(4) × SU(2) × SU(2) is the next grand unified theory that we’ll find.

There’s so much more to do that, when we make this jump, the world will become unrecognizable. I believe that there are other life forms in the universe and that they can come and visit. I don’t think that’s preposterous. I think that we are an uncontacted people.

On that note, I think we have more to talk about in the future. This has been a truly unique, fascinating conversation, and I think for a lot of people in our audience, this is not a typical conversation. I just want to highlight the importance of hearing what you have to say, because I think it’s very important that even if something seems not apparent—particularly when things seem unlikely, or when things seem outlandish or heretical, or whatever term you might want to put on things—it’s valuable to take that in.

It’s definitely a lot to think about—the paths ahead—and I’d love to talk more.

I’d love to do that. I’d love to do it with your friends, and I also just want to say thanks for having me. It’s time for America to lead because there’s no other nation I trust like I trust our people to take care of this planet. We should make common cause with our rivals as fast as we can because the danger of getting to the next level of leverage in a contested situation is overwhelming.

It’s very important that we went into the Persian Gulf, and it’s very important that the scientific community recognizes that, despite their feelings about Donald Trump, we’ve got 4 or 5 individuals with the science portfolio who are much, much better than the PhDs think. Before you turn up your nose at this, consider doing what I did, which is to come for a few days to Washington, D.C., and utter the dangerous words: “How can I help?” I’m going all in.